In moviegoers' consciousness, Venice has been a place of idiot
enchantment ever since Katharine Hepburn planted the Hollywood flag there in Summertime and cut
across the sun-drowsed cadenzas of Italian parlato with her brittle Bryn Mawr yap.

Then the sun lashed down for 90 min­utes, under full Hollywood
warranty, as Miss H swept into Venice from New England to meet Rossano Brazzi, to gog­gle at his ruby-red Murano goblets and to yatterswoonfully as the whole of St. Mark's Square,
pigeons included, burst into the music of "Summertime."

This year rain sploshed from a tem­peramental
sky, alternating with a sun beating down without boxing gloves, and "Summertime" vied with the "Godfather" theme for a photo
finish at the top of the San Marco charts. Out on the Lido, alias Festival Island, pile-driv­ing
cloudbursts drove the audience who had just seen the evening screening of MiklosJancso's new film back
into the auditorium to see the midnight showing of John Stahl's 1945 Leave
Her to Heaven,whether
they wanted to or not. (After five seconds of blinding Stahlian
baroque they did.)

Yet even in the teeth of wild weather, diminished budget, and absent
films (Peter Weir's Gallipoli,R. W Fassbin­der's
Lola,promised but not materializ­ing), it's nearly impossible not to delight
in the Venice Film Festival. The bril­liantly successful new events – the
noon and midnight (mezzogiorno,mezzanotte)screenings –
were free, open to the pub­lic, and packed to the rafters. In these and other
time slots movies so bad that one wonders how they crossed the la­goon
without curling up in shame and dropping into the depths jostle with
wide-awake sleepers and real and thrill­ing surprises. And in the Sala Grande, a prime and goldy-plushed
viewing hall, the con brio Italian public so rampantly toss the flaky
tropes of critical response that it's like being back in the Salad Decades of
movie fever. (Leave Her to Heaven
was a case in point – howls of approbation for every close-up of
Gene Tierney's waxen, wondrous beauty and Vincent Price's youthful essays at
Gothic menace.)

But for the yin of love-of-flamboyance in Italy, there is – and it's
more discerni­ble every year – the yang of a different kind of extremism: a
social-conscience righteousness that rides roughshod over cinematic art in
the pursuit of a hairshirt holiness of purpose.
Thirty years after Rossellini and DeSica made
Neo-real­ism tick and anti-Fascism and proto-So­cialism meld with human
emotions, Italian filmmakers are still churning out carbon-copy Paisansand Open Cities and Shoeshinesin which the imprint of hu­manity
and originality gets ever fainter and fainter. In movies like Peter Del Monte's Piso Pisello or Salvatore Pisci­celli'sLe Occasione di Rosa,both bowing
at Venice this year, the same peeling Italian streets echo to the same fight
for survival and social equality, the same urchins tipple along the sidewalks
in the shadow of the same busty prostitutes, and it all seems curiously meaningless in 1981: long after
Godard
has given social realism such
a twist that blank-eyed window-on-the-world verismo has scarcely been a mainstream proposition
in cinema since the Sixties.

And sure enough it was just such a Deeply-Meaningful social document,
from Germany not Italy, that won the warm embrace of the Golden Lion this
year. Margarethevon Trotta'sDie Bleierne Zeit(The German
Sisters) is a tight-faced
fable of anarchy and sis­terhood in which two siblings who grew up as
children on opposite sides of a temperamental gulf switch roles in adulthood
so that the shy one becomes a terrorist, the lively one a bewildered mother
and bystander. It's a single-minded film made with antennae fully stretched
to catch the political anxieties of modern Germany: the phantom of a
phoenix-Fascism arising from the Aryan ashes, the desperate weaponry of anar­chist
Terror used to combat it, the bewil­derment of those caught in the crossfire.

But for "single-minded" you can also read one-dimensional. Von Trotta paints her film in bleak negatives and alarmist
austerities – the best scenes are fright satire (a prison visitor is
body-searched by a butch female warden scarcely less thoroughly than the
prisoners them­selves), the worst, those in which any kind of human warmth or
casual sponta­neity is essayed – and the film finally closes in on itself
like a grouchy clam.

The socially righteous, anti-authori­tarian, grouchy-clam bent in the
Venice Fest, evident in the
favoring of these films, was dementedly obtrusive in the selection of the big
U.S. movies for the festival. True Confessions, Blow Out, Prince of the City,and Cutter's
Way are in part or in degree conspiracy movies all, and very fine when
blowing into view one by one. But when seen together, as here, they seem like
an endless replay loop of post-Watergate paranoia, in which no corner of
America can be found in which Wealthy Capitalists do not walk about, covering
up heinous crimes and/or clobbering prostitutes.

●

While Lions, Golden or Silver, were prowling about seeking excellence
to pounce upon, Top Roar should have gone to two movies that combined
food-for-the-mind with fabulous visual feasting.

Siren's
Island is a real find –
stream-of-consciousness from Switzerland. Di­rector Isa Hesse-Rabinovitch creates a moviegoer's Morpheus Descending,adream trip on stepping stones of the
drugged self into an Underworld/Under­ground of floozy female chanteuses, drag
acts, and the lunatic fringe of showbiz. Mostly set in New York but also slither­ing for surreal variation
through the skull-piled catacombs in Rome, this no-narrative fantasia is pure
association-of-ideas in film form. The spectator is Ulysses lured onto a
multi-level island Bohemia by the siren-song of 1980s sub­culture. The images
are Dadaism at its most daffy and DeLuxe, from the
slinky vamp crooning "Moon of Alabama" at a waxwork of Jimmy
Carter, suit and grin intact, to the lady snake-dancer juggling giant pythons
with a nervous smile. The metaphor that binds it all together is the
stratification of the human mind, from the surface taboos and proprieties of
the super-ego to the deep-down ferality and non
sequiturs of the id. We dive from skyscrapers to sewers in the course of the
film, and even a grubby service ele­vator becomes an up-down theater sym­bol,
with shuttling proscenium and quick-changing acts. It's a surreal movie that
jettisons "narrative" completely and yet keeps up a riveting
momentum of form and feeling for 100 minutes.

Tyrant's
Pleasure.More narrative-flouting legerdemain, this time from MiklosJancso. Given up for self-repeat­ing in many
circles today, the hero of late Sixties Hungarian cinema is actually en­tering
perhaps his most fascinating pe­riod. This fugal extravaganza on the theme of
political intrigue should be bottled and labeled "Essence of Machi­avellianism":
a convoluted carnival of camera roulades and courtly politicking in
the tale of an exiled young nobleman returning to Hungary from Italy, with a
troupe of actor friends in tow, and find­ing himself the favored but
frantically schemed-around nominee to the throne. The legato fluidity
of Jancso's staging here extends even to moving the
actors around on unseen floats or skateboards so that human groups and
galaxies whir round each other in a ceaseless continuo like a solar
system of power struggle. There are, in the true Jancso
tradition, mists, masques, mimes, and mono­logues, and it's all magnificent.

●

It takes an Italian film festival to favor the far-out and present it
in full unflinch­ing close-up. Any country that can beat­ify K. Hepburn's
blackbird-caw into rapt warblings trades in Magick. And this year even film critics, sere austere breed,
got their share. Being boated across the lagoon for an evening's screening on
an outlying island; the white wall of a villa used for a screen; local ladies
pushing chairs about in the giant bougainvillea-tossed courtyard and speaking
in a cata­ract of argot (without English subtitles); a star-studded night
looking down on a stuttering projector, a giant beam of light, and a rapt
audience.

Further synesthesia and symbiosis of place
and event burst forth in Venice proper in a huge Titian to El Greco
exhi­bition at the Doge's
Palace. Wandering through the gallerias hung with blown-up movie frames painted 500 years ago, you realize that
cine-literacy doesn't be­gin with Lumière and Méliès and Porter and Griffith; it begins
with the frozen-embryo dynamics, poised tiptoe on the brink of motion, of the
painted canvas. Visconti's movies sprang so clearly from the loins of Titian
that seeing these paintings over again is like discovering Senso and The Leopard anew. The impact of classical painting on cinema is a
virtually unexplored study field, although many of today's or yesterday's
most darling auteurs – from Sirk
to An­tonioni – have specifically modeled scenes or
shots on paintings.

Indeed if there was a common failure area in the films at Venice – Jancso, De Palma, Siren Island, and a
few other con­tenders honorably excepted – it was their visual slovenliness.
Nothing to do with prizing the statuesque above the kinetic (nothing could be
more restlessly kinetic than De Palma) but with preferring ring crafted eye-impact to plonk-the-camera-anywhere-and-shoot.

Examples of the later were legion. In the British Film Institute
Production Board's Meave,
co-directed by Pat Mur­phy and John Davies, an Irish-born, London-naturalized
young girl (Mary Jackson) revisits strife-torn Belfast and her family and
worries about her loyal­ties in long wedges of awful dialogue. The camera,
schooled in cine-veritémurk, peers through
the half-light like an uninvited and increasingly pariah-like guest.

Kaleidoscope(Chaalchitra)gives us Indian
director MrinalSen eyeless in Calcutta. The self-proclaimed
Marxist-Leninist Bard of Bengal gropes through the visual and dramatic doldrums
of a tale about poverty-pinched family life in the Big City. The
unavailability of pub­lic transport, the polluting smoke of coal stoves: Sen hits the same point over the head so often
– it seems to be the only way he knows how to make it – that the audience ultimately a out with ter­minal concussion.

Krzysztof Zanussi'sFrom A Far Country, dubbed by some wags the "Pope
opera," gives us a mini-biopic of Pontiff John Paul II sewn into the clodhopping
140-minute fabric of a vas­ter, would-be definitive social history of the
Poland that shaped the Pope. Ce­zaryMorawski threads laconically through the background of
the tale as the pre-papal Wojtyla, while topliningthesps Sam Neill,
Lisa Harrow, and Christopher Cazenove stand
up-front and deliver the bulk of the humanist bromides masquerading as human
con­versation. Zanussi appears to have looked
courageously over one shoulder at the Vatican and over the other at Film Polski et
al in a sprain-the-neck
effort to offend neither Pontiff nor power struc­ture. The film succeeds in
offending many, boring more, and is an aural and pictorial shambles.

No less shambolic was Marco Fer­reri'sStory of
Everyday Madness, made in Los Angeles in the English lan­guage by the
once-reckonable director of Dillinger is Dead. In recent
years Fer­reri has lost all sense of how to frame
or pace a movie. This Brobdingnagian Beat-era
banana skin is based on the writings of Charles Bukovsky
and in­cludes Ben Gazzara (as Bukovsky's
alter ego) among the players sliding to their doom on a slithery mush of
"outra­geous" dialogue and actions. Star turn is Gazzara trying desperately to fuck a fat lady with his
head – he wants to get back to the womb. Overlong, deeply meaningless, and
enough to give the Sexual Revolution a bad name with the Moral Majority.

Despair not, however. Look about at Venice, and there was still plenty
there.

Yuan Ye.Chinese blood-and-thun­der from the People's Republic, and the first
film to suggest that mainland China might ere long catch up in vivacity with
the Hong Kong industry. Stylish camera-swoopings
and an Oriental love of foreground filigree – branches, rushes, flowering
trees – make this a stunning film to look at, although the human be­ings don't
quite pulse to the same life as the landscape.

Christian F. Case-history bestseller of teenage
drug-addiction becomes smash-hit movie. Prowling through the hypo-strewn
purlieus of Berlin's "Zoo Bahnhof," director Ulrich Edel chroni­cles
the link between discos, heroin ad­diction, and teen prostitution. Leaping
into celluloid from the "Read all about it" confessions of a real
drug casualty – the title's Christiane F. – this movie has already blitzed most box office records in West
Germany. Edel gets stunning
performances from his barely post-pubescent leads, and although the film is
painted thick in yellow-press Sensationalese –
teeny-bopping cuties impal­ing themselves like pin cushions in every seamy
Hades from subway tun­nels to public toilets – one still gazes agog at the
fair old ferocity and realismus with which it's done.

Sogni d'Oro.NanniMoretti, who looks like a lean-and-rueful Werner Her­zog and leans to windward like an unsta­ble gondola pole, wrote, directed,
and stars in this delicious slow-burn comedy from Italy. Poking fun at the
film busi­ness, Moretti plays a
moviemaker work­ing on a film about Freud. Moretti's
oscillations as performer between con­suming world-weariness (he brings his
own camp-bed to the set and goes to sleep between takes) and sudden apo­plexies of rage at home ("I don't want to
resolve my Oedipus complex!" he screams, getting up from the table and
swatting his mother in mid-dinner) are compulsive and convulsive. Woody Al­len
and Mel Brooks, beware! – with a tad more consistency in his gags, Moretti could become the best Euro­pean comic since
Tati.

Francisca.Manoel de Oliveira, feted latecomer to the festival circuit, celebrates his Portuguese
Summer with a magnum opus mightily worth the mar­athon length (two hours forty-six
min­utes). If Visconti sprang from the loins of
Titian, de Oliveira hails from the
House of Velasquez. Francisca isan over­whelming conspiracy of colors and tex­tures, filmed in Valasquez velvets and marooning its characters in a
thrilling half-world between autonomy and arti­fice, life and portraiture. As
the de Oli­veira compositions
burn and brood around a tragic triangular romance in last-century Portugal,
the film's form is so formal it becomes almost a new surre­alism: especially
when the stately series of tableaux vivants suddenly spurt into motion (a slapped face,
a runaway horse) or when, conversely, a raging sea-view seen through a window
suddenly "freezes" into a painted backcloth. With its teasing
tensions of stillness and movement and its masque-within-masque mise en scène,de Oliveira's
work is not only a great oeuvre newly discov­ered but a whole new way of
looking at cinema.